Adidas: It’s Time to be “Built to Defy” Again

Though Adidas’s current slogan may be “built to defy…,” the brand has chosen specifically not to defy, or even to comment on, Kanye West’s recent remarks.

West is no stranger to controversy, whether for his words during Taylor Swift’s speech at the 58th Grammys, calling out Bush following Hurricane Katrina, saying “George Bush doesn’t care about black people,” or for featuring a “Make America Great Again” hat in a recent Twitter post.

However, West’s recent remarks regarding slavery in his interview with TMZ have drawn an even greater response. During part of the conversation, West spoke about slavery in the U.S., saying, “when you hear about slavery for 400 years—400 years? That sounds like a choice. You were here for 400 years, and it's all of y'all?! It's like we're mentally in prison.”

Soon after the interview, people reacted with #KanyeWestIsOverParty and a petition asking Adidas to drop their partnership with West, which has over 23,000 supporters. Despite its belief in West’s right to free speech the petition says, “we as consumers have the right to fight back against this type of dangerous propaganda.” The petition indicates that Adidas ending its partnership with West would “tell the world they do not want anything to do with anyone who believes that millions of Africans chose to toil the fields in bondage for 400 years.”

Adidas CEO Kasper Rørsted has declined to comment on West’s slavery remarks, saying, “We’ll neither comment nor speculate on every single comment that our external creators are making,” Rørsted said. “Kanye has been and is a very important part of our strategy. He’s been a fantastic creator, and that’s where I’m going to leave it,” according to a Bloomberg interview. Interestingly, though, Rørsted acknowledged in an earnings call “there are some remarks that we don’t support.”

While it might not be realistic for Adidas to respond to every comment that its collaborators make, in my opinion, West’s comments demand attention. It is irresponsible to allow disturbing creators’ comments to go unresponded to, and it sends the signal that Adidas is complicit as West victim-blames oppressed, enslaved people, implying that those who were brutalized and tortured could have somehow contributed to their own enslavement.

During a Bloomberg interview Rørsted quipped, “while Kanye is a very important part of the Adidas brand, Adidas is a large, global company.”

If this is true, then continuing the collaboration with West is certainly not essential to Adidas but a choice. If Adidas truly wants to be a global company, then it cannot support creators who engage in harmful discourse.

At the very least, Adidas owes its consumers, and all human beings, a response.